Trump, taxes and the rest of us

The presidential debate on Sept. 26 left me with a nagging question: “Why am I not smarter?”

After all, in mid-April I paid a hefty chunk of tax to the federal government. When Hillary Clinton noted that Donald Trump paid no federal income tax for a couple of years in the late 70s, he said, “That makes me smart.”

Which I suppose implies that if we were all as smart as Trump, the federal government wouldn’t be funded, at all.

But the story is a little more complicated: A few days after the debate Politifact rated Clinton’s original assertion as “Mostly False.” It turns out that a 1981 analysis of Trump’s finances found that during 1975, 1976 and 1977, Trump, indeed, paid a total of $71,932 on income of $219,334.

According to Politifact, however, in 1978 and 1979 Trump paid no income tax because he reported a loss of $3.8 million.

A loss of $3.8 million doesn’t sound all that smart, but fair enough; if you have no income, why should you have to pay income tax?

Still, Trump’s attitude toward taxes is worth noting. It includes the implicit notion that we’re unfairly overtaxed, that internal revenue is “squandered,” as Trump put it, and that anything more or less legal that we can do to get out of paying taxes is justified and even admirable.

Of course, many of the wealthy embrace this attitude, and they’re happy if the not-so-wealthy embrace it, as well.

But this is a self-indulgent, immature perspective for a liberal democracy such as ours.

I’m not sure when taxation as we know it began, but it must have been a great triumph for the progress of civilization when vassals and peasants stopped paying tribute to lords and kings, and free societies began to impose taxes on themselves to provide for defense, infrastructure and the well-being of the citizenry.

Of course, many Americans complain that their taxes are too high, but “over-taxation” is a meaningless concept; what’s important is the ratio between what you get out of the system and what you put in.

And we get a lot out of the system. The most belligerent, anti-tax activist can suffer the misfortune of a house fire, and a group of men and women will drive a well-equipped vehicle over to his residence on tax-financed public roads and, no questions asked, put the fire out.

The benefits of this system fall more or less equally on the rich and the poor, but ours is a progressive system that, quite reasonably, expects the rich to pay more in taxes. After all, they have most of the money, and a great deal of their wealth depends on resources, services, infrastructure and labor that belong to the rest of us.

So Trump’s inherent contempt for taxes and, presumably, for chumps like us who pay them is naturally reflected in his plans for massive tax cuts for the rich, which are rationalized by the discredited theory that if the rich have more money, they will create more jobs.

But I suspect that Trump’s desire to avoid taxes is grounded in a less theoretical, more fundamental instinct, the compulsion to hold on to as much as possible of the essential element of his brand: wealth.

Indeed, a poor Donald Trump is impossible to imagine.

Of course, the wealthy have the right to pay only the legal minimum in taxes. But when they pay little or no taxes, we have the right to know why, which means that we need something from Donald Trump:

We need to see his tax returns. They would tell us if some of his income has been filtered through his charitable foundation in order to avoid taxes. They would tell us whom he does business with and how charitable he is. And they would tell us if, as reported on Sunday by the New York Times, he depended on huge losses in order to pay no taxes, at all, for years.

Without this information, none of us should even consider voting for him for president.

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. Readers may send him email at jcrisp@delmar.edu.